John Underkoffler

John Underkoffler is Chief Scientist of Oblong Industries, developer of the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment. Oblong's technological trajectories build on fifteen years of foundational work at the MIT Media Laboratory, where John was responsible for innovations in real-time computer graphics systems, large-scale visualization techniques, and the I/O Bulb and Luminous Room systems. He has been science advisor to films including Minority Report, The Hulk (A.Lee), Aeon Flux, Stranger Than Fiction, and Iron Man. John also serves as adjunct professor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts; and on the 5D Conference advisory board, the University Art Museum board at California State University, Long Beach, and MIT's Visiting Committee.

Session: Keynote - Animating Spirit

A way to change everything is to build a completely new HMI. The new HMI will be exhilarating, beautiful, and capable, a complement and compliment to people. Just as surely as we do it will occupy real-world space, because that's where the action is and because it will need to pay special heed to hands and what they're up to. It will be characterized, like living things, by dynamism, by motion elegant and allusive and comic. It will make the pixels it inhabits -- projected and barnacled, singular and teeming, sessile and itinerant -- it will make these brazenly heterogeneous pixels interoperable: at once incidental and indispensable. This new HMI will embody a conviction that design, that fundamental human activity, is its as well. And it will infect everything built atop it with the same sentiment. The resulting world might well be one we like.So let's see.

He wowed the audience by showing off the g-speak SOE (spatial operating environment) technology that Oblong has built. And if that looked familiar, it’s because Underkoffler was also the guy who advised the filmmakers behind Steve Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report. Yes, all of those kickass gesture computing scenes are his work. And over the past decade or so, he’s been working to bring that technology to the real world with Oblong. And they’re getting close. Really close. -TechCrunch